How AI is Changing Digital Marketing

AI is one of the most important innovations in recent times. It is often billed as “the new electricity”, implying that it can have as lasting effects on our lives as electricity did. When you look around you, you’d be surprised at how much AI has taken over our lives. Recently we posted how technology is changing digital marketing There are a few more obvious examples, like self-driving vehicles, whereas others are lesser known but more dramatic. Experts think, if the pace of development doesn’t slow down, AI could do almost any function a human could. Meaning, your personal voice assistant like Amazon could order food. It could also pay your Spectrum internet package bills and set up a dentist’s appointment. The way things are going, anything is possible.

How AI is changing digital Marketing

AI in Digital Marketing

AI is actually a loose term that includes all technologies and approaches that “think” like a human being. It was mostly the stuff of science fiction in the early ‘eighties to the early 2000’s. But AI has evolved a lot over the years. Initial tests of AI, in games like GO and chess, were promising, with AI defeating recognized masters at the game. Yet many people complained that AI could only work in a limited framework. OpenAI, backed by Elon Musk, developed an AI that beat a human player at one of the most complex modern strategy games, Dota2. The AI didn’t beat just any player either, it beat Dendi, who is arguably the best human player alive today. In a one-versus-one setting, the AI crushed Dendi. Dendi then forfeited future matches, saying the AI acted partly human and partly like something else. Elon Musk himself praised the AI, a conclusive evidence that AI can handle very complex data sets. Making use of neural networks, the AI trained on Dota 2 for two weeks, amassing a lifetime of experience.

But AI is not limited to showboating and beating humans at video games. In fact, there is at least one AI we use on a daily basis, the one powering Google. Many fields are beginning to include AI in their processes. Digital marketing is one where AI has particularly useful applications. As AI develops and becomes more “intelligent”, digital marketers’ reliance on this tech will grow. Here are just a few ways in which AI is changing digital marketing as we know it:

Personalized-for-customer Marketing

Integrating Data and Analytics

Contextual Results for Search Queries

Creating and Curating Content

Machine Learning

1. Personalized-for-customer Marketing

The main approach used by AI for decision making relies on data. This is very useful when the AI gathers data from different platforms in a marketing setting. Most platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter gather and store data on their users. AI can make use of this data to develop customer profiles for each unique customer and target them individually. Once the AI has this data, it can make marketing decisions personalized to each unique customer. This is something which humans may experience difficulty in doing. If this keeps up, soon AI will be taking bigger and more strategic decisions for us.

2. Integrating Data and Analytics

We discussed above that AI gathers data from different platforms. It uses this data to make personalized marketing decisions. This is a very important function, letting AI collect and analyze data from different software and platforms in use. This is what makes AI so effective at identifying and targeting different markets. By analyzing the data it gathers, the AI can perform an analysis that is much more complex than a human’s.

3. Contextual Results for Search Queries

The ideal AI should be able to understand the semantics or context behind a given search query.In our recent article on how to boost a social media campaign with video marketing, we noticed that through machine learning, an AI can understand more about the meaning behind search words and phrases. It can even include more complex links between data sets, like a given query and existing search history. This makes search results a lot more relevant to the context of any search query.

4. Creating and Curating Content

It is already known that AI can create content. In fact, content that is virtually indistinguishable from human-generated content. This is the foundation behind software like WordSmith. Especially when generating news stories, AI can collect relevant data and report on it objectively. But there is so much more to AI than creating news content. AI can also work to curate content. It does this by showing the most relevant content to a visitor, personalized to that unique visitor’s preferences. You can see this in most sites and applications you use. Amazon’s “similar items” results and Netflix’s “suggested for you” are just two examples of AI showing curated content.

5. Machine Learning

Machine learning is an AI technology that does exactly what it says. It lets machines “learn” to solve problems on their own. This is possible by letting the AI learn about previous data-sets that it can use to solve these problems. In marketing, this is something that has huge applications. It can target specific audiences with specific ads, generating leads as well as SEO. Digital assistants like Siri, Amazon Alexa, and Google Home learn from your habits. They learn your preferences, your patterns and your routine to be able to serve you better. Given enough time, they may even be able to complain via the Charter Spectrum customer service number when service is down.